The human heart takes centerstage at the U's new Center for Cardiovascular Repair.

On the mend

By Mary Hoff

From eNews, February 10, 2005

If you scrape your knee or break an arm, your body knows right
what to do: make more skin or bone to replace the damaged tissue.
But it's not that simple if what's hurt is your heart. When cardiac
muscle is destroyed by a heart attack, cardiomyopathy, or other
illness or injury, there are no replacement parts waiting in the
wings.

In some patients, a heart transplant or a mechanical device can
help restore at least some of the lost function. But in most
instances, the owner of the damaged heart is sentenced to a life of
downward spiraling health as the surviving cells literally work
themselves to death struggling to do the job of their fallen
comrades. Soon, however, that picture may change. With the creation
of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair (CCVR) at the University of
Minnesota, the stage has been set for moving a revolutionary
heart-mending strategy from the laboratory to real life.

Known as cellular cardiomyoplasty, the approach involves
infusing living cells from other parts of a person's body into his
or her heart to restore lost function. This revolutionary approach
has been shown to improve heart function in animals and has begun
to be tested in humans, with encouraging preliminary results. The
rigor of randomized clinical trials is next.

CCVR director Doris Taylor should know better than just about
anyone what promise this new technology has to offer. In 1998,
Taylor led a research team at Duke University in North Carolina
that published a paper showing improvement in the function of
damaged heart tissue in rabbits after transplantation of leg muscle
cells. "All the pieces are in place here [at the U] to succeed,"
she says. Those pieces include a cadre of top-notch cardiologists
and surgeons; the Stem Cell Institute, which offers opportunities
to collaborate in exploring the use of adult stem cells for
repairing not only heart but also vascular tissue; the Biomedical
Engineering Institute, which can design almost anything we can
imagine; the Lillehei Heart Institute; the Center for Magnetic
Resonance Research; the Minnesota Molecular and Cellular
Therapeutics Facility, which allows researchers to prepare cells
under the rigorous conditions needed for human clinical trials; the
local biomedical industry community; and what Taylor refers to as a
"strong belief in innovation."

"I was hired to be the catalyst," she says. "My job is to be a
connector among the various aspects that are here and to really
help bring together what might have seemed like disparate areas of
research into a network, so that we can move ahead faster and
better than anyone else and really be the place people think of
when they think cardiovascular repair."